Meant-To-Be Mother

A flash of movement loomed at the corner of her vision and she looked up from the letterbox to see a kid riding his bike out into the street.

Swearing loudly, she slammed on the brakes, the big car tugging and shuddering as she held on for all her might. But her unpractised arms couldn’t keep the car straight.

The wheels locked and skidded sideways and, with a crunching jolt, she mounted the kerb. The car slammed to a halt when it came face to face with a hundred-year-old tree in a mass of screeching tyres, grinding metal undercarriage on concrete gutter and the acrid smell of burnt rubber.

Siena’s shallow breaths couldn’t dull the sound of her thudding heart.

Then she remembered the kid on the bike. She looked through the windscreen.

Nothing.

She looked out the driver’s window, then craned her neck to see over her shoulder to the road behind.

Neither child nor bicycle were anywhere to be seen.

CHAPTER TWO

JAMES was sure he heard the screech of car tyres over the sound of his electric sander. He let the sander whirr to a slow stop and whipped his protective goggles to the top of his head.

He stared through the sun-drenched dust floating in the air about him in his backyard workshop, listening.

But there was nothing bar the regular sounds of suburbia—a creaky Hills Hoist clothes-line twirling in the tropical breeze, noisy miner birds fighting over scraps, an amateur pianist a few houses over practising his scales…

He must have imagined it.

His hand moved back to the goggles on his head, ready to get back to work, when he heard a car door slam in his front garden.

He was out of his workshop and sprinting down the driveway before his work gloves even hit the ground.

The first thing he saw was a green Ute mounted halfway up the kerb, its driver’s side door open wide, its front bumper crunched in against his front tree and a soft wisp of smoke spiralling from the bonnet.

The second thing he saw was Kane’s bike lying on its side on the street behind the car.

The image ripped through him like someone tearing a photograph in half. If Kane was taken from him too…

Determined to just know, his numb feet took him to the kerb, and once there he saw enough to stop him from thinking such dreadful thoughts.

Kane sat on the road, leaning back against the far side of the car. He was alive. He was animated. And he was talking to a young woman who was crouching down in front of him, running frantic hands over his limbs and head.

A slight young woman with shaggy brown curls finishing just below her ears. A gauzy sort of black top sat high on her back as she crouched, revealing a wide band of olive skin above the waistline of her tight dark jeans.

James stared at the skin, realising in a completely unexpected flash of awareness that it was the first time he had seen that part of a woman’s anatomy in an age.

James brought the disturbing thought and his feet to a very definite stop with a crunch of work boot on gravel.

Kane looked over, his pale brown eyes widening as he saw that he and his new friend weren’t alone. Instant tears ensued as though the magnitude of what had happened was only realised once James was there to witness it.

‘Dad?’ Kane said, his high voice cracking.

‘I’m here now,’ James said as he willed his feet to pick up where they had left off.

One step at a time, he repeated in his head with each footfall.

He had no idea where he had picked up such a mantra—Kane’s varied counsellors, late night Internet browsing or even Dr Phil—but it seemed the right mantra for that moment.

He moved towards his son, still not ready to find blood or pain or cracked bones. ‘Buddy, are you okay?’

Kane nodded and stood as though he knew James needed to see that he was in one piece. ‘I’m fine. I scraped my arm but, as I told Siena, it hardly hurts.’

At the mention of the woman’s name, James looked back to find her face drawn with apprehension, her thin eyebrows arched into a frown, her stunning ocean-green eyes wide and blinking and a full lower lip hooked guiltily beneath her two front teeth.

She wiped shaking hands down her tight jeans as she stood, her slim legs wobbling on ridiculously high fire-engine-red pointy heels. Why anyone would drive in such contraptions he had no idea. He fought down a sudden urge to tell her exactly that. To yell, to let loose with every thought that was streaming through his frantic mind, to twist his recent fright back into much more comforting anger.

But every thought that crossed his mind flitted across her remarkable face and he knew that he didn’t have to. He saw mortification. Embarrassment. Something else so quick he missed it, but he caught the tail-end of it through a brief flash of pink across her cheeks.

And then, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, he recognised the moment she reached the ‘get over yourself and go talk to the guy’ phase.

‘I’m Siena Capuletti,’ she said in a lilting voice, holding out a thin hand.

‘James Dillon,’ he said in return, moving to her to shake.

Her hand was warm. And almost impossibly delicate. This was a hand that had known more manicures than manual labour. For the first time ever he actually felt self-conscious of the work-hardened calluses marring his own large hands.

He let go first but she whipped her hand back with equal speed. As she tucked it into the back pocket of her dark low-rise jeans, James caught a flash of flat tanned stomach.

His insubordinate gaze flickered upward, but he then had to contend with those eyes. Big, green, framed by the darkest thickest lashes he had ever seen. Suddenly he wasn’t quite sure where to look.

‘This is my car,’ the woman said, pointing at the green Ute when he said nothing. ‘Well, it’s my brother Rick’s. I would never buy a T-shirt in such a colour, much less a sixty thousand dollar car. I was only going slowly, thank goodness, but I didn’t see Kane until he was upon me and when I did I braked as hard as my size sevens would allow, and I swerved, and I missed him completely.’

Suddenly she turned at the waist and pinned Kane with a stare. ‘You are quite sure I missed you completely?’

Kane nodded earnestly, watching Siena with extreme interest, and James could see that the kid was as captivated as he was himself.

‘Oh, thank God,’ she continued, crossing herself with a flourish. ‘This car is just so bloody big and powerful and…excuse my French. I think I may have hurt your gutter and I have definitely hurt the car and Rick is going to kill me but I will, of course, pay for any damage to your garden, or driveway, or tree or anything.’

It took James a few moments to realise she had come to the end of her speech. He looked back down at Kane, who was now leaning beside the car, sniffling but no longer crying. He was cradling his elbow but, of the two of them, James was pretty certain Siena Capuletti had come out of it the more afflicted of the pair.

James offered the woman a smile by way of acceptance of her apology. Thankful for the reprieve, she smiled back, her eyes glittering like the sun off the coral-laden waters off Green Island.

He stamped out his own smile before his imagination got the better of him. He leant over and picked up the bike and rested it against his thighs, creating a wall between himself and the winsome stranger.

‘If Kane says you missed him,’ he said, ‘then you missed him. He shouldn’t have been riding out on to the road as it is.’

She shook her head, her riotous dark curls swishing about her ears. ‘I should have been more careful, especially driving down a suburban street.’

She looked up at his house, staring at it for a few moments, her face haunted, overly so he believed, considering how little damage had been done to either person.

She swallowed and then looked back over at him, her big green eyes blinking nineteen to the dozen. He couldn’t help himself—he just stared right on back. Was it because she was familiar? Perhaps she lived locally and he had seen her at the supermarket.

No. That wasn’t it. He had never seen this woman before. But there was definitely something tugging at him. Something potent enough that he found a sudden need to drag his eyes away and down to Kane.

‘Now, what have you done to your arm, buddy?’

Kane twisted his arm to show him the nasty scrape. And blood. Seeing blood dribbling down Kane’s arm clouded James’s mind until he felt as if he was watching the world through a pinhole.

At the behest of each and every counsellor who had drifted in and out of Kane’s life over the past year—the first recommended by the hospital, yet another organised through Kane’s school and even a private one who James thought smelled of his old gym bag but Kane liked him and that was recommendation enough—James had pared his life back to one core mission: devoting himself to Kane. To protect him. To keep him safe. To shield him from all further pain. So how the hell had he allowed this to happen?

‘Maybe we should whip you down to the emergency room to make sure.’

As soon as the words left his mouth James knew it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. Kane’s pale eyes grew as big as saucers and his face lost the last vestiges of colour.

Damn it! Over a year of being a single dad and he still managed to find new and interesting ways of screwing it up.

The last time the poor kid had seen his mother she had been in the care of a pair of smiling ambulance drivers on her way to the hospital for tests. And she had never come home.

James ran a quick hand back and forth over his short hair. This wasn’t the time for all that. Late at night, while Kane slept, he could kick himself for any mistakes he’d made before and since to his heart’s content, but in daylight hours it was all about keeping Kane on an even keel.

‘What was I thinking?’ he said, bending down until he was at eye level with his son. He reached out and tucked his hand behind Kane’s thin neck. ‘A bit of Dettol and a bandage ought to do it. It might sting a bit, but you can take it, can’t you, Buddy?’

Kane nodded, the fear in his eyes dampening. ‘’Course I can.’

‘I know first aid,’ a modest voice said from behind them. ‘Only last week I took my yearly refresher course.’

James turned to find Siena shuffling from one high-heel-shod foot to the other, wringing her slender hands together so hard he could see her knuckles turning white.

‘This is entirely my fault,’ she said, decreasing the distance between the two of them until she was close enough that he could smell her perfume. Subtle. Expensive. Drinkable. ‘Please let me make it up to you.’

Her stormy eyes beseeched him and in that moment he could not remember what she was referring to. A moment was all it was, but that moment was significant. For in that moment he had no memory. No memory of sadness, or loss, or a life put on hold. All he knew in that moment was the exact colour of her eyes.

He wiped the back of his hand across his hot forehead and was not at all surprised to find fresh beads of sweat had gathered there and they had little to do with the Cairns weather. Tropical temperatures he was used to; this unfamiliar woman he was not.

Worried that she was about to fret herself into a dead faint on his front lawn, and knowing she couldn’t go anywhere in the Ute as it was, James gave in.

‘Come on in out of the heat. I’ll call someone to check out your car. I think we could all do with a cool drink of lemonade.’

James held out an arm and Kane leant against him without argument. He tucked Kane’s slight warm body against him and took the wobbly bike up the driveway, not quite sure how it had come to be that he of all people had invited a perfect stranger into his house when even his closest friends had not been inside those walls in months.

Siena ran around to the open driver’s side door, quickly shoved her PDA into her handbag and slammed the door shut. She didn’t bother locking it; at that point if anyone wanted to try to drive the car away they were welcome to it.

She then found herself following a stranger and his son into Fourteen Apple Tree Drive.

Shock. The only reason she was even contemplating walking into that house again had to be shock.

So why wasn’t she just waiting by the car while the guy called her a cab and a tow truck so that she and her wobbly legs could be on their way? She had somewhere else to be. She had a Dolce and Gabbana suit fermenting on the back seat of her car, for goodness’ sake! She even had Rufus’s business card floating about the bottom of her handbag, and she was certain he could be at her side faster than any cab.

But no. For some reason she was following this man into her house…his house, for lemonade, when she could really do with a strong gin and tonic to calm her seriously taut nerves.

She intently ignored the curved driveway her father had poured the year she’d turned nine and the black shutters on the second floor which she had broken twice when trying to climb out the window after curfew.

Instead she kept her gaze tight on the back of a dusty black T-shirt stretched across a broad back, patches of hair on tanned muscular arms glowing in dappled sunshine, scruffy back pockets of worn old jeans moulded to the lean lines of long legs.

As she neared her father’s beloved rose bushes, which she had deflowered completely to load on his breakfast tray one Father’s Day, Siena focused as close as someone could on the back of James’s neck where short ash-brown hair had been recently shaved into a perfectly straight line revealing a strong tanned neck with a couple of sexy crinkles thrown in for good measure.

Okay, so this was wasn’t going to be easy. But did she really need to be focused on sexy neck creases and moulded jeans to get her through? The guy was a father, for goodness’ sake. No wedding ring—like any self-respecting single woman she had noted that the moment she had seen the guy. But he was definitely the antithesis of what she normally preferred in the male friends she made on her brief stints in different countries around the world.

She liked men in suits. Clean-shaven, single men with time and money and ambition who knew what they wanted and went after it. Men not unlike her.

If her first impression was spot on, and it always was, this guy was a labourer of some sort; the rough pads on the palms of his hands had given that away.

But, remarkably for her, that was as much as she had figured about him. Whether on purpose or through circumstance, this one had a pretty solid wall shielding strangers from seeing too far past that half-smile of his.

Nevertheless she could tell that he was covered in what looked like sawdust, he was way too polite for the likes of her and he lived in Cairns. Therefore he was utterly out of bounds.

As they reached the front door, James casually kicked off his work boots to reveal black socks with matching holes in the toes. Kane then held on to the other side of the doorway and mirrored James’s actions precisely, pulling off his sneakers by the heel using the toes of his opposite foot.

From nowhere Siena was hit with a wave of vulnerability that was almost stronger than the apprehension repelling her from going inside her childhood home. The charming scene touched her, creating a ball of something entirely new deep in her stomach.

It felt a heck of a lot like longing, but for this focused, no-strings-attached, jet-setting career girl that was unlikely.

Maybe it was nausea. She’d been in a car accident after all! Surely such a thing would make anyone a little woozy around the edges and it would explain the wobbly knees, intense interest in the backs of strangers’ necks and weird cravings cramping at her innards.

When she stopped in the shade of the portico, the object of her woozy feelings smiled at her—the same odd half-smile he had afforded her earlier. Up close and personal, his smile didn’t seem so free and easy—it was cool, aloof, barely reaching his slate-grey eyes. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure that she had been sensing the ghosts of her own childhood when driving by this house after all.

‘Da-a-ad,’ Kane said, tugging on James’s arm, and it was enough for his smile to kick up a bare notch, a sliver, a millimetre, but even that tiny alteration turned some sort of switch inside him. And inside her.

With that new low burning light came flecks of the palest blue into James Dillon’s grey eyes, a captivating crease appeared from nowhere in his carved right cheek, and suddenly Siena couldn’t remember what she had been worrying about in the first place.

‘Come on in. We don’t bite,’ James said, bathing her in the affectionate smile meant for his son. He then turned and followed his son into the house, leaving the door open for her to follow.

She had to go ahead with this. There was no way she wanted to feel beholden to these guys. Or guilty for almost running the kid down. Especially not guilty. She’d swum through enough of that to know one could never come out clean at the other side.

If she could confiscate cellphones from Fortune 500 CEOs, tell sheikhs to sit down and shut up and show million-dollar football players how to use their airsickness bags, she could do this.

With a determined flourish she kicked off her red Jimmy Choos, tucked them neatly against the doorway with a quick prayer to the fashion gods that no suburban housewife with a discerning eye for designer footwear might happen by, and with her hot bare feet curling against the cool tiled floor she followed him inside.

Her feet slowed once she realised that, though on the outside she never would have mistaken her old home, on the inside the ground floor was absolutely nothing like it had once been.

Whereas the home she grew up in had been dark and overstuffed with fake Italian statues, old furnishings and too many rugs, James Dillon’s home was like the perfect summer day. Buttermilk-yellow walls, soft cream carpet and a collection of the most beautiful highly polished wooden chairs and side tables and cupboards created the illusion of endless space. Walls had been knocked down to create an open flow throughout a house which to her had always felt claustrophobic. She could see all the way through to skylights and bronze hanging pots in the spotless white and wood kitchen and a sunroom had been added to the back of the house, housing a small cane sofa overloaded with scatter cushions.

Finding herself alone, she wandered to a shiny black piano, eerily situated exactly where hers had once been. And, just like hers, it housed a bunch of framed photos scattered across the closed lid.

She laid her red handbag on the piano lid and leant in to get a closer look.

James now wore his brown hair short with a sprinkle of ash throughout, but in the main photo he had longer hair curling about his face, he wore frayed shorts and a T-shirt and had Kane thrown over his shoulder as they ran down a tract of perfect white sand at the beach. She sighed, recognising the landscape as Palm Cove—the peaceful little hamlet where she ought to have been if Rick hadn’t guilted her into staying with him in the ’burbs.

Her eyes devoured other photos in which James fished, jumped from planes and taught Kane how to ice-skate. And, in all of the photos, he was smiling. All big white teeth, pink wind-burned cheeks and crinkling blue-grey eyes.

‘Well, there you go,’ she said aloud, her voice echoing in the lofty space. Whereas polite, quiet James of the half-smiles and worn clothes was a looker, Action James was a true blue—no doubting it—gorgeous son of a gun.

Siena gulped down a strange thickness in her throat. The very fact that she was thinking such thoughts about some guy with a kid should have sent her walking out of the house then and there.

As her hand reached for the handle of her bag and her itchy feet made a move to do just that, Siena suddenly caught sight of a photo of a woman hidden amongst the two dozen of Kane and James. She reached in and took it in her hand.

Sunlight gleamed off thick tousled blonde hair. Rows of neat white teeth beamed from a wide smile. Brown bedroom eyes looked not at the camera but at the person behind the lens.

‘Siena?’ James said from somewhere out of sight.

‘Coming!’ she called out, quickly placing the photo back on to the piano lid.

‘Through here,’ he called back.

She followed the sound of his voice and found Kane sitting on a closed toilet seat while James was on his haunches searching through a cupboard in an airy bright white downstairs bathroom where her dingy old laundry room had once been.

And, though there was a picture of a beautiful blonde on his piano, and she had almost hit his son with her car, and she had somewhere else to be, and it was none of her business, she couldn’t help taking a moment to reconcile James with the guy in the photographs.

Okay, so there was definite gorgeousness still there, only in sepia rather than full Kodak-colour. He looked up to find her staring at him and his grey eyes flickered and narrowed.

Siena blinked several times over, before doggedly turning her attention to the job at hand. Around a dozen different antiseptic creams, lotions and bandages lay on the wide bench top at his side.

‘Are you bunking in for a nuclear winter?’ she blurted out.

‘Somehow I don’t think this part of the world is at the top of the nuclear hit list, if it ever comes to that,’ he returned, his voice unexpectedly laced with sarcasm. And, since Siena was quite partial to a bit of that herself, she felt her stomach flutters returning.

‘Fine. But then what’s with the personal pharmacy?’ she shot back.

‘I’m thorough. Is there something wrong with that?’

‘Hey, I’m not complaining. Only a silly woman would put down thoroughness. Just making an observation.’

James’s brow furrowed ever so slightly, his mouth hooked up at one corner, and he blinked long and slow. And, just like that, she sensed the game was on.

‘And what else have you observed?’ he asked, moving to sit back on his haunches, one muscular arm leaning casually along the top of the cupboard door.

She glanced at a much safer Kane, who was watching her with big sad puppy dog eyes, completely trusting. ‘Well, I’ve learned that it’s always the big strapping ones who fall apart at the sight of a bit of blood. Now, are you going to sit there with your head in the cupboard all day or will you just move over and let me do it?’

She gave James a little shove on the shoulder and he duly stood and moved to the far side of the room. She then grabbed a bottle of familiar brown liquid, which Rick had preferred when Siena the tomboy had come inside crying after getting in the middle of scrappy fight with local boys.

She felt the temperature in the room change as James moved to sit on the tiled edge of a neat oval spa bath—watching her.

‘If I drop a dollop on this perfect white floor,’ she said, not looking his way, ‘I’m scared that sirens will blast and water will stream from jets in the ceiling.’

‘Don’t panic,’ he said. ‘We have a cleaner.’

‘Oh, do we now?’ she asked, pulling a la-di-dah face at Kane. Kane grinned back at her, all too-big teeth and goofy dependence, and her stomach flutters coagulated back into that odd sensation of longing.

‘His name is Matt,’ Kane explained. ‘He comes in most days and vacuums and gardens and turns on the dishwasher.’

‘The dishwasher?’ she repeated, sneaking a look at James. ‘My, oh, my. Whatever would we do without him?’

She was surprised to find that the engaging half-smile had not left James’s face. She looked determinedly away.

‘And he picks me up from school,’ Kane continued, oblivious to the undercurrents swirling about the small room. ‘And he stays on sometimes when Dad has a job to finish or has to go out to see clients.’

‘I see,’ she said, though she clearly didn’t. The image of tousled blonde hair came to mind and she wondered briefly what the sunshiny, piano-top woman in their lives did when James had to finish a ‘job’ or see clients.